1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to software retrieval tools for networks, and more particularly for a change-detection and highlighting tool for the Internet.
2. Description of the Related Art
Today's society is sometimes referred to as an information society. Technology has increased the ease of generating and disseminating information. The widespread acceptance of the global network known as the Internet allows huge amounts of information to be instantly transmitted to persons around the world.
Explosive growth is occurring in the part of the Internet known as the World-Wide Web, or simply the "web". The web is a collection of millions of files or "web pages" of text, graphics, and other media which are connected by hyper-links to other web pages. These may physically reside on a computer system anywhere on the Internet--on a computer in the next room or on the other side of the world.
These hyper-links often appear in the browser as a graphical icon or as colored, underlined text. A hyper-link contains a link to another web page. Using a mouse to click on the hyper-link initiates a process which locates and retrieves the linked web page, regardless of the physical location of that page. Hovering a mouse over a hyper-link or clicking on the link often displays in a corner of the browser a locator for the linked web page. This locator is known as a Universal Resource Locator, or URL.
The vast amount of information available on the Internet has created an overload of information which the casual user cannot digest. Internet search tools or search engines allow users to find desired information by searching for keywords through an index of the millions of documents posted on the Internet. Search engines such as Excite of Mountain View, Calif. and Digital Equipment's "ALTA VISTA" help users quickly sift through huge amounts of information to find the desired information.
A characteristic of the Internet is that it is relatively easy to change or update information. The user may wish to know when updates are made to the desired information he found with a search. For example, the information found may describe a bug fix or other revision in a software program. Initially a crude work-around or even just a notice of the bug may be posted on the Internet. Later, this posting may be updated with a more robust fix or other useful information. The information could also be a list of phone numbers or other contact information, or it could be a product list or a competitor's web site, advertising, or press releases.
The user could frequently re-access the information on the Internet to see if changes have occurred, but this is time-consuming. Frequently re-accessing the information is tedious, particularly when the information is contained in a long document, or when many documents must be checked for changes.
Software tools have been developed to automate the task of detecting updates to information on the Internet. Early tools such as America Online's News Profiles allow users to specify keywords which are periodically searched for in a news database. News articles containing the specified keywords are sent to the user by electronic mail (e-mail).
These automated software tools are sometimes known as "netbots", a network robot which automatically performs some task for a user. Netbots allow users to better manage the information on the Internet and reduce the amount of information that a user must read. Filtering down the amount of information is critical to making good use of the overwhelming amount of information available on the Internet.
More recent change-detection tools allow users to register a document or web page on the Internet and be notified when any change to that document occurs. The user "registers" a document by specifying the URL of the document, and providing the user's e-mail address. The change-detection tool stores a local copy of the document together with the user's e-mail address. Once every day or week the change-detection tool accesses the source document at the specified URL, and compares the retrieved source document to the local copy of the document. If a difference between the older local copy and the just-retrieved source document is detected, then a message is sent to the user's e-mail address, perhaps with a copy of the new document or a copy of the changes.
The document-change tool could store an actual copy of the entire document at the tool's web site for comparison. However, storing the whole document at the document-change-tool's web site is expensive because large amounts of storage are needed. For example, if 500,000 documents were registered, and each document averages 50 Kbytes, then 25 GigaBytes of storage are needed to store copies of the registered documents.
Instead of storing the entire document, the revision date or time-stamp of the document could be stored. U.S. Pat. No. 5,388,255 shows a database which compares time stamps to determine when data has changed. Since the time-stamp is much smaller than the entire document, storage space is reduced at the tool's web site.
The inventors have a change-detection tool which stores a checksum or CRC of the document rather than the time-stamp or the entire document. When the document is initially registered, a checksum is generated for the entire source document. This checksum is stored at the tool's web site. Each week when the source document is retrieved, another checksum is generated and compared to the stored checksum. If the stored checksum matches the newly-generated checksum, then no change is detected. When the checksums do not match, then the user is notified of a change by e-mail. The user can optionally have a copy of the new document attached to the e-mail notification.
Such a change-detection tool called a "URL-minder" has been available for free public use at the inventor's web site, www.netmind.com, for more than a year before the filing date of the present application. Over 150,000 documents or URL's are registered at that site for 1.4 million users.